The Poser (14 page)

I did what I could to make my answer sound flat and rote, like a kid who's heard the same lecture too many times. “Because it makes him feel like less of a customer.”

His smile vanished. “I know how it is. You were born,
cursed
, with that urge. To peek behind the curtain. No, the stage can't hold you for long.” He added, “I was pleased to see you finally got it right, by the way.”

“What's that?”

“Your impression of Lucy backstage. It was finally
whole
.” His smile erupted again. And it was then I realized. The way he acted when he saw me in his office—I was sure he was taken aback, ambushed, but it wasn't that at all. He had been
excited
.

“I don't know how much longer I need to be here,” I said, even as I was feeling all the more bolted to my chair and the second chair of my knees and arms. I was back in it. Such a subtle thing, such an infinite difference. The lift of the chin, the tap of a finger. A centimeter between
happening
and tumbling, between having and being had.

“What is it you want?” I asked. But I already knew, it had already started. He was going to make me a spy.

Once inside the bedroom Bernard with bearlike swipes chased her from the dresser to the mantel to the four-poster bed, at the edge of which the broad-shouldered woman squealed in delight, the belt of her fur-trimmed negligee still somehow staying tied. Earlier she'd performed a perfect B-girl curtsy, turning on white slippers when offering her hand, even doing that thing where she stuck her index finger in her dimple and screwed it in. I understood. It didn't matter how well she pretended, what mattered is that she would never stop.

On all fours on top of the bed she made eyes at me in the armchair as Bernard kissed her neck.

“Am I gonna know your friend, too?” she asked.

“Shut up.” He began to insult her body. Each time she emitted gasps as round as quarter notes. It went on like that. Not like he was playing an instrument so much as moving his hands over one of those pianos that play themselves. Buttoning up his shirt, he nodded to me. “You want this?”

“Please,” she pleaded as I rose. “Help.”

Sauntering toward the bed, I produced a high, whimpering laugh. Around the sheets hung the stench of bad fruit. “Please.” Her shoulders were warm and pressed, her hair like steel wool. I pulled it. “Shut up,” I told her.

Laughter arose from the beaten armchair the moment it was over. The woman slapped me loosely on the back, her hands slick and warm. “Where'd you find this one, Bernie?”

She had gotten up and was fixing her hair in the mirror. As she did, she bit her lower lip self-consciously and sprayed a lavender bottle around, shaking her head into the mist of it. “Sweet of you to come see us at the Jade House.” When she turned to me, her eyes bruised with makeup, I turned away.

She led us back down the dark hallway, holding my hand. In the room lined with green drapes the women positioned themselves not any one too close to another. On the widely opened laps of gap-toothed men. By the bar. Their legs like unsheathed swords. “Come back soon, won't you?” she said. A host of women in negligees joined her in ushering us to the door. In their languid movements only their hips seemed tightly wound. “Thank you,” I said again as the door shut. In the canyon below, the lights of the city shimmered a ghostly blue. A hot wind ratted out the palm trees, which were darker, wilder lengths of darkness. My hands trembled as I lit the cig.

“Don't thank them,” Bernard said.

 • • • 

Often I didn't know where we were going. “Remember to compliment the teacups,” Bernard would say, or, “I hope he doesn't go on and on about that boat,” and Frankie or Lou would snicker in the town car's backseat as the pinks of the city oozed down their suits.

Ever since our meeting in his office, my days at the Communiqué felt numbered. For three weeks I continued to perform on Saturday night, a run of awkward and transitional shows during which I appeared in Bernard's getup and, between volunteers, acted in his manner. Max hated it, and I suppose I did, too, but for different reasons. Every facet of the routine bored me, but the ubiquity of touch seemed worst of all. At the bar, after shows, they passed me around like a wind-up toy.

Mostly I kept to the back room with Bernard and his people. I liked to slide the cards to the edge of the table and peek at an inside straight draw. By then I'd gone back to the tailor and had all the duds straightened out—the suit and later the boots, several pairs. One afternoon Frankie found me in the office and, without a word, handed me a heavy crumpled paper bag. A .22, which I kept holstered out of view, like Bernard's. I never once used it. But its heft was crucial, like a sandbag.

All of this helped, of course, with Lucy, the few times I saw her darting around the Communiqué. As Bernard, I viewed her in her totality, like an animal at the zoo, the way everything it does inadvertently contributes to a definition of what it is. The few times we found ourselves alone in a hallway, she made a general show of exasperation, muttering, “Excuuuuse me,” as she shouldered past me.

Except it did happen one more time, backstage. Bernard was right: She liked to make people naked. Our bodies started it without us. And once it was happening, it was like staying in a house you used to live in, you know where they keep the gin. She thought it would be like it was. She thought we would frolic and lounge, that I would risk it all to entertain her in that unventilated room. But I got my clothes on quick as I could. “You two fuuucking now?” she shouted, and I walked thirty blocks home trying not to shake.

Mama had written me after the incident with Lucy. Someone had tipped her off. Maybe Max.

MAY
5

Oh, my Giovanni has the heartache. It is a terrible feeling, isn't it? I think you ought to come home at once, away from those show-business types. I've got half a mind to go down there myself and scoop you up, put you in my pouch like a kangaroo. I liked Lucy all right, Giovanni, but for her to do this? And don't get me started on Bernard. Really! I have a very bad feeling about that man. Come home. We'll eat fancy foods and see movies and even do some of our old shows, just you and me.

M

She left messages at the Ambassador Hotel. I ignored them. When I wrote, I made it as short as I could.

Mom—

Bernard's not half as bad as you think, and it's all swell, really. As you said, it's done with Lucy, and that's good.

When she wrote and called after that, I didn't respond. At first this made me nervous, but Bernard insisted. He had theories. I don't know if I believed them, but I liked to hear them delivered that way, with the certainty of the vicious. His father also left around the time he was born. “I was deprived all that,” he told me once. As I soon discovered, he was as capable of lengthy speech as he was of silence, the latter like a holster from which the former was drawn. “Not the father exactly, but his long decline. Daddy's looking a little stooped going up the porch stairs. Daddy forgot Aunt Donna's name today. Decline is the real inheritance,” he said. “A man with a father who's present has seen him age and weaken and throughout the process feels himself edging closer and closer to manhood. But our fathers are always of immaculate age and strength, and so we are always boys. It's the principal job of the father to show his son how to die. You had Max, and he's a serviceable model, but I think it's time you became your own man.”

It may seem ridiculous to claim that I was doing that—becoming my own man—when I was in every way aping another, and yet it did feel that way, as if finally, as Bernard, I might tunnel my way to freedom. As I'd hoped, the impression sustained that dreamy sensation, that fog that descended whenever I'd imitated him previously. It was so potent, the feeling, I often woke up at three a.m. at the Ambassador Hotel not knowing where I was, or knowing where my body was, but feeling that
I
was distinctly elsewhere—in the hallway, perhaps, collecting ice or strolling down a path in the park. When, at the Communiqué, people gawked at our identical outfits, I didn't care, because I knew they weren't seeing me, really. That I wasn't there to be seen. In this sense, no, it didn't feel like becoming Bernard. It felt like entering a monastery. We wore the same uniform in the way monks don saffron robes, symbols of the ego's retreat.

In fact, there
was
something Eastern in Bernard's view of the world. He often described life as a theater or illusion in whose grip most people lived. “Look at this guy,” he'd say sometimes as Clem, one of his associates, left the table. (The eccentricity of our shared appearance went over fine among the poker players, largely because Bernard was the boss and I the star.) “Can you believe this guy?” he'd say, though the man had done nothing more than cough into his fist. And yet I knew what he meant, and it took his doing it several times, with other people, to realize it reminded me above all of Mama, the way she and I used to hunt for threads in Sea View.

It was Bernard who started bringing up the move out west, the idea of getting into the movies. Each day it waited for us, like a fat chauffeur in a town car. “A star of the screen's the perfect Trojan horse,” he said. “You can put anything in it.” I cherished that phrase: a
star of the screen.
For a man onscreen can be gawked at and scrutinized, but he cannot be touched.

 • • • 

As the founder and president of Monument Pictures, Nathan J. Sharp possessed a likeness seen widely about town. There was one shot in particular that papered industry rags of the Tinsel Titan, as he was known, striding out of a shiny black limo in coat and tails, like a general taking his first step on conquered ground. It was an image, I discovered, that had little to do with the man bending cautiously over his desk to extract a sip of chicken soup. Every two minutes the phone on his desk would ring, and Sharp would scoop it up and yelp, “Never again,” or “Did he mention the carpet?” before hanging it up and gesturing with his arm for Bernard to continue.

Nathan was an old friend of Bernard's. “Old friends,” as I soon learned, encompassed a variety of acquaintances, rivals, businessmen, and madams. The phrase functioned, really, as a euphemism for debt, the directionality of which became obvious soon enough. In this case, Nathan seemed to owe Bernard a half hour, no more. In the short breaks between the tending to the phone and his soup, he prodded Bernard with questions about my act back east.

Bernard answered, I smoked. It was the old wind-up toy routine from the Communiqué. Be still. Spring to life. I was not listening is the truth when Bernard tapped me on the shoulder.

“Said I read somewhere you're from Italy,” Nathan was saying. He didn't seem much fazed by our getups.

“That's right,” I said.

“You tried to scrub it all off. But it's still there.” He grinned. “Let me tell you, I came over here with nothing. Nada. Now look at me! They call that
self-made
.” He'd started out as a furrier in Poland, he told us, making three cents a day. “My real name? Nathan Sharpovitch. Now I am the famous Nathan Sharp!”

He grew so animated I was moved to share an anecdote about the time I got thrown off a passenger train for imitating a steward with a whistling
S
. Lying in this way felt like the opposite of effort. Nathan slapped the table viciously and at the end of the meeting pulled me aside to mutter that we foreigners were the ones who invented this country. “You did all right, Bernie,” he shouted, mentioning the screen test as we left, like an afterthought.

 • • • 

“Play it low,” the director instructed me in the drafty room. “The surface is calm but
underneath's
where we feel it.” When he left, I tried a cig. My face, in the bulb-lined mirror, looked thin and colorless. My hands were cold. “Play it low,” I thought, walking out.

The lot was vast and dark, the size of a hangar and loud with banging doors. The day of the screen test I got lost inside it, finding myself on a gangplank high above a film shoot in which a blonde stabbed a man to death with a letter opener. Later, I ended up in a hall lined with red doors. When I tried one, a ring of tuba players glared back at me, each wearing a bib. Behind a second, a gray, speckled wolf snored fatly. Another revealed a row of actors in feathered headdresses raising their arms before a firing squad. Several more of these doors I tried, witnessing a kaleidoscope of increasingly bizarre scenes, before tumbling out into the afternoon.

The lot recalled the backstage of the Communiqué—labyrinthine and black, but blown up to a grotesque size, a backstage swollen to monstrous dimensions so that the actual site of filming, the purported reason for our being there, shrank to a contested detail. Encircled by craning lights, the set provided the sole zone of illumination, like an unexpected fire deep inside a cave. I hurried toward it.

Normally, I would have taken my time. From Bernard I had learned the art of arrival, but the suit, a heavy wool number, broad in the shoulders, ruined it all.

I thought it would be like the screen test. That day, a thin, long-striding man had handed me a sheet of paper with typed lines of dialogue. One line said, “Now you're gonna listen to me.” Another: “I'm afraid it's a little more complicated than that.” I did it all like Bernard, that is to say, as if pushed by the presence of others into an even greater interiority. Soon the picture was under way:
Everyman
, a spy film about Harry Knott, a master of disguise who through the course of the picture impersonates a slew of characters, among them a Russian diplomat and a British tycoon, to root out a Communist mole inside the government.

But on this, the first day of shooting, I was made to wear this new, double-breasted suit. Then the director ambushed me in the dressing room to discuss my character, Harry, and how he would act “when he's himself.” I had thought it was agreed that I would just do Bernard, but the director, an excitable and lanky man with a feral rim of red hair around his otherwise bald head, seemed to have other plans. “Don't use too much wind,” he said. “Not too much wind. He feels something
underneath
.”

At the set itself I was besieged by attention. The actor Sterling Smith roughhoused my hand, while a chatty makeup artist dabbed my nose. In no time, a long, black microphone materialized inches from my face while someone unseen ordered me to say the words “pepper” and “baby bubble bath,” a pair of disembodied hands straightening the shoulders of the suit. “Pepper,” I said. “Baby bubble bath.” Bernard paced by the police commissioner's desk. “Looking a bit pale,” Max said, though I couldn't see his face in the harsh white light.

He sounded worried, as he often did out west. At every opportunity, he encouraged a return to the City, to the stage. Yet it was hard to take these suggestions seriously, as he was so out of place in Fantasma Falls. Months before, we had attended a party at a producer's house above the canyons. Guests (the men in bathing trunks, the women bikinis) draped themselves on deck chairs in postures submissive to the sun. In these loungers' hands every task, whether easing onto a bar stool or waist-deep into the pool, was studiously bleached of pace, a slowness like that of bank tellers in cinematic robberies, who, warned against sudden movements, open the cash register with grinding care.